Stripping the Rugby League World Cup down to eight teams is admitting defeat

After another weekend of thrashings in the Rugby League World Cup, it feels like the tournament is faced with a chicken or egg scenario with regards to its participation in the future.

Does it cull the amount of teams from 16 to eight, with the sides that miss out having to climb to a higher standard before being allowed to participate again?

Or do the likes of Greece, Scotland, Jamaica and Wales – the bottom-placed sides in all four pools, with zero wins between them and respective for-and-against scores of -180, -124, -170 and -32 – need to continue to play in the quadrennial tourney to ever get to a standard that makes it worth their while to turn up?

I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I read one of the better arguments for the latter in a wonderful story by Dan Walsh over the weekend about the game in Jamaica.

“You have to start from somewhere,” Reggae Warriors assistant coach Roy Calvert told Walsh.

“… [N]ot that long ago, the All Blacks put 145 on Japan [in the 1995 Rugby World Cup]. Now Japan has hosted a World Cup and beaten South Africa.

“You can’t have a World Cup played by four or five nations. If you want a truly international game, it takes time and patience. As they say in State of Origin, you have to ‘pick and stick’.”

It’s easy to dismiss Jamaica given they turned up, got spanked three times and now head home.

But this is a country that, according to Walsh, has “no designated rugby league pitch”, yet still has its own version of State of Origin as a team from the capital, Kingston, takes on the rest of the island.

And while the bulk of the national players feature in the English Super League – qualifying on heritage grounds – five of the squad that went to the World Cup ply their trade for Jamaica’s Duhaney Park Red Sharks, reigning champs of the country’s eight-team National Club Championship.

Eight club teams and a rep series that Calvert says has “proper hatred to it”, all in a country without a single rugby league field.

You’ve got to be impressed with that.

So is it completely beyond the pale that with a bit of time, effort and money from the game’s global body, a country that has produced the likes of Usain Bolt – in the conversation for the greatest athlete of all time – and players who qualify via heritage like dual-code legend Jason Robinson and the current tournament’s leading try-scorer, Dom Young, could become another Fiji, Papua New Guinea or Lebanon?

(Photo by Martin Rickett/PA Images via Getty Images)

But are Jamaica going to receive the requisite attention if their only showings on the international stage is the Americas Rugby League Championship, which has been held three times in total since its inception in 2016?

The other advantage of having a World Cup is that otherwise uninterested parties are more inclined to get involved.

Watching on in Greece’s coaches’ box on the weekend was Roosters chairman Nick Politis, one of the richest humans on the planet.

Politis’ involvement may not have stopped the English from running riot over the Greeks, but you think a man with decades of knowledge and success in the game, who also happens to have billions of dollars in his bank account, isn’t going to make the national set-up better in the long term?

But while ‘Uncle Nick’ is a proud Greek, I wonder how involved he would be with the national side if their only matches were against fellow European minnows Serbia, Malta and Ukraine.

A World Cup gives scope, size and an audience. Sure, these ‘smaller’ teams may be getting belted by their more established counterparts, but how do you become established in a sport except by playing the game?

Not for nothing either, but you think the guys in these teams that get thrashed are embarrassed that they got to play against the likes of James Tedesco, Joe Tapine or Tom Burgess?

I have the answer for you:

While culling the tournament back to eight teams would see a higher percentage of quality games, the World Cup would be stripped of all development value.

Seven of the eight teams are pretty much set: Australia, New Zealand, England, Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. As for which nation would take the eighth spot, suggestions of a qualifying tournament are all well and good but how keen are these smaller nations going to be to fork over the money and spend the time required to play the required tournaments when just one team gets any result from it, and that result rolls around once every four years?

Basically, it ends any hope that Jamaica, Greece, Scotland or Wales have of playing a World Cup again. Probably Italy, Ireland and Cook Islands too – and that’s to say nothing of countries like USA and Canada that didn’t even qualify for this tournament.

And if you can’t even dream of making the World Cup, what’s the point of trying? The flow-on effect would be to decimate what work has been done around the world to create the likes of Jamaica’s NCC or Greece’s domestic competitions (yes, plural).

A World Cup of 16 teams may mean we’ll see blowouts but it’s a true reflection of the game at present: not where it needs to be, but at least it’s having a go. It needs work, but it has the aspiration of being better.

Suggestions that the World Cup needs to be of a super high standard for the whole tournament is head-in-the-sand stuff. It needs to have a development aspect because it’s a developing sport.

Rugby league is not a strong international game. But that doesn’t mean it never can be.

By having the likes of Jamaica take part, the game says “we see you” to the people who are training on concrete and kicking conversions over PVC crossbars in the Caribbean. It gives them something to work towards and a reason to keep going.

A tournament of eight teams is effectively an admission that this is as big as rugby league is ever going to get and any nation outside the Pacific or northern England should just give it up.